Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (9 page)

The back third of the room had no chairs. The space, cordoned off by velvet ropes, was crowded with all the rest of invited Moscow, people with cards that were said to have been sold at amazing prices, cards for which we were apocryphally led to believe paintings and even apartments had perhaps been exchanged. The artists in the crowd—many of
whom had been part of the Collective Action at the river—stood in whispering knots, only a sideshow at what was properly their own seminal global event. Behind the ropes were the curators of the Pushkin, the friends of the Soviet artists, the other members of the vanguard. Some artists from Leningrad had come; one artist’s cousin had made the trip from Tblisi, over a thousand miles away. People pushed and shifted toward the front of the throng, only to be borne back again on the waves of people pressed against people, crushed, but redeemed in mid-July by the blissful air-conditioning, which was not exactly a staple of Soviet life.

At seven o’clock the bidding began. De Pury, perspiring despite the air-conditioning, was behind the podium, conducting the sale as though he were the master of ceremonies at the greatest show on earth. The early Soviet work far surpassed its anticipated prices; one painting by Rodchenko,
Line
, estimated at $165,000 to $220,000, sold for $561,000.

With Lot 19, the sale of contemporary Soviet art began. The works were listed by the artists’ surnames in alphabetical order—alphabetical in the Latin alphabet. So the first was Grisha Bruskin, a tiny, gnarled man who had been at the periphery of things for years, deemed by his peers to be sweet and technically capable but relatively insignificant. All his paintings doubled, tripled, quadrupled their high estimates; then one estimated at $32,000 sold for $415,700.

The artists began to look at one another sharply. They were finally getting to see how people from the West spent money. With casual, almost weary gestures, the members of the Sotheby’s tour raised paddles of blanched wood into the air, offering six-figure sums. A difference of $1,000 seemed to move them not at all. Fortunes such as many of these artists had never dreamed were casually handed over for a painting—a Soviet painting. The artists began to understand that changing government policies might ultimately leave them inconceivably wealthy.

After Bruskin came Ivan Chuykov, a highly esteemed elder statesman of unofficial art. If someone would pay over $400,000 for a painting by Bruskin, then surely the work of Chuykov would be worth millions. But his
Fragment of a Fence
failed to reach its low
estimate of $15,000, and
Noughts and Crosses
didn’t reach its low estimate of $20,000; they barely exceeded their reserves. Thus the sale continued, with high prices that confounded the Soviets and low prices that embarrassed them. Then a remarkably pretty but essentially decorative painting by Svetlana Kopystiyanskaya went on the block; she was a serious woman and a good painter, but not a riveting original, and the bidding for her work was going higher and higher. How could it be? If the vanguard had not been sequestered behind the rope, and if they had understood the ego dynamics of the auction world, they might have noticed a paddle battle. Had they been at the posh official dinner the night before, they might have gathered that Elton John had instructed his manager to bid on the same painting that a glamorous Swiss woman announced that she would have at any price. After that painting realized $75,000, the artists kept repeating, in an uncomprehending drone, “Does that mean that people from the West think Sveta Kopystiyanskaya is a better painter than Chuykov? Than Kabakov?”

Almost every painting sold. The prettiest paintings, or sometimes the most blatantly unusual works, sold for the most money, which threw the Moscow avant-garde for a loop, instilling a dread that the West might create a canon based on standards totally unrelated to their own. They were deeply upset by some of the bidders they met, whose refusal to engage with a Soviet context seemed to imply an inability to recognize that there was a context at all. At one studio, after listening to a highly theoretical painter give a thirty-minute explanation of his work, a woman who ended up placing one of the highest bids of the sale had asked, “Do you paint in black and white and gray because it’s hard to get colored paint in this country?”

Though some of the best work was sold to people who understood it, most went to people who were shopping for souvenirs. The sale brought in $3.5 million, more than twice the optimistic estimate of $1.8 million. Simon de Pury hugged Sergey Popov, deputy director of the Ministry of Culture.

As they left the great room, one woman pointed to her catalogue and exclaimed to another, “I bought this one.” She frowned slightly. “Or else this one. I don’t remember which.”

“Whichever,” said the other. “As long as you have something to remember tonight by. Wasn’t it exciting?”

Thus the artists were brought into the public eye, an unsettling place to be if your work is based on the most extreme form of privacy. Designed to be meaningless, even boring, to the eyes of the KGB, it was created according to standards so secretive that, paradoxically, it would remain incomprehensible to the West long after it became famous there. When an artwork is cut off from its origins, the easiest thing to lose sight of is its irony. Insistence on the multiplicity of truth, in Soviet art, is as political as is painting, because accepting a single official truth is an old Stalinist habit. The nature of elusiveness—rather than the thing eluded—must be the focus of criticism. This is why sociological examination is the most rational way to proceed. It is valid, in short, to applaud the brilliance of disguise; it is comical to applaud the disguise itself. The Sotheby’s sale catapulted the artists into an ambivalent relationship to celebrity and fortune that was to undermine their entire system of values.

While the bidders’ ignorance was not the fault of the auction house, had the sale been staged less theatrically, some of the souvenir shoppers would have stayed home. Of course, then the paintings would not have brought such enormous sums. And if the sale had not been such a blockbuster, the Ministry of Culture would have been far less likely to stage in the months that followed other, similar events that would help many more Soviet artists. The ministry, which retained a sizable part of the takings, suddenly began looking at the once-detested artists with a self-interested kindness now that they had become a prime source of hard currency.

Sotheby’s saw all these perspectives. The auction house knew it was tapping a new wellspring of profit, but at the same time it transcended its usual pedestrian commercialism. At the farewell dinner the next night, even the most cynical of the Sotheby’s staff—and the most skeptical officials in the Ministry of Culture—appeared to be on the brink of tears. The two sides had long stood in emblematic opposition to each other, and if one accepts that the function of art is ultimately communication, then this sale was itself a work of art, a miraculous engagement. In the years that were to follow, critics,
curators, collectors, and artists variously credited the auction house with discovering a movement, inventing a movement, or destroying a movement. To some extent, all of them were right.

The artists had mixed feelings about the sale and were perhaps unable to see all the motivations and reasons behind it. The day after it took place, they organized a trip on a large boat to protest Western commercialism. The avant-gardists were all there, arguing fiercely, as we sailed to a resort area, about the likely effects of Western commercialism. Then everyone disembarked to walk in the woods, sit in the sand, or rent rowboats or little paddleboats. I ended up in a rowboat with Viktor Misiano, the curator of contemporary art at the Pushkin, and Zhora Litichevsky, a painter with incredible staying power as an oarsman. Everyone was at play, affirming once again the strength of the avant-garde community. As paddleboats tried to bang into us and laughing people tried to splash us, Misiano would nod toward this or that one and say, “There is an important Leningrad conceptualist. There is a true Communist painter. There is a Soviet formalist.” Like the Action in the woods, it was a chance to see this madcap community at play, which was a good way to begin to understand their coded work.

Only after the sale did one of its organizers describe to me the first meeting at which Sotheby’s had discussed individual artists with the Ministry of Culture. At that time, it was exceedingly difficult to get information about artists, and Sotheby’s put forward a list of underground artists whose names they had obtained from Western contacts inside the USSR. The culture commissars told the auction-house contingent rather peevishly that every Westerner who came for a meeting brought exactly the same list—and that it could be identified as
exactly
the same list because one of the names on it was of a pianist rather than a painter.

The sale marked a turning point in Soviet art history. In the two years that were to follow the event, some artists who had been dominant figures in the avant-garde sank into obscurity. Others grew accustomed to life in the jet set; they were invited to the penthouses
and palazzi of collectors and had dinners thrown in their honor in apartments at Trump Tower in New York. Their work came to be mentioned regularly in the press, but even when it was unpopular, they themselves were often popular. They appeared on morning television shows and were profiled in glossy magazines. Their strongest work came to reflect the certainty that the West could understand the will to communicate, if not their specific acts of communication. That they would look forward to a certain celebrity with cautious ebullience never meant they were beyond reflecting bitterly on what was past.

The poetics of meaning for these Soviet artists lies partly in their nostalgia, and it is perhaps a greater mercy than they realize that the tendency to homesickness is among their cultural attributes. When they recognize in their work that a dream realized is also a dream forsaken, they resuscitate both their purity of purpose and the sense of humor that we in the West find so beguiling. Time and inevitable failures have started to restore to these artists the subtle gift for self-reference they employed so effectively in the pre-auction years. In rediscovering their country and their former lives of oppression from a salutary distance, they have rediscovered their original reasons for telling, secretly or otherwise, what they perceive as inalienable truth. The strength of their beliefs convinces us. Truth-telling gives this work its high moral and aesthetic standing—the ultimate gift the artists provide not only to museums and collectors, but also to the world. As these Soviet artists and their body of work move West, how they change will change how we think about art.

Though the work of many artists of the late Soviet avant-garde was commercialized by the West, they soon achieved a degree of visibility in their own country as well. The Russian capital now boasts the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Multimedia Art Museum, and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art; the Garage is housed in a lavishly converted fifty-eight-thousand-square-foot former restaurant in Gorky Park, with an atrium that features two thirty-foot-high
murals by Erik Bulatov. Artists work in studio spaces in a former power plant in Moscow and in what was once St. Petersburg’s Smolinsky industrial bread bakery. Independent art schools in Russia include the British Higher School of Art and Design (established in 2003), the Rodchenko School of Art (2006), the Institute Baza (2011), and the Open School Manege/Media Art Lab (2013). The Hermitage was the site of the last Manifesta, an important pan-European exhibition, and the Moscow Biennale is going strong, along with commercial art fairs such as Cosmoscow.

Vladimir Putin’s government disdains free expression, however, and Russian authorities frequently ban or close down exhibitions that offend conservatives. The women of the feminist rock band Pussy Riot were imprisoned following a 2012 performance at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior; their story captivated the international press, but is only one of many such episodes. The “art-anarch-punk gang” Voina, “War,” seeks to challenge “outdated repressive-patriarchal symbols and ideologies.” Voina staged an orgy at the Timiryazev Museum of Biology in Moscow concurrent with the 2008 Russian presidential election. In 2010, five of its members sketched a two-hundred-foot-high phallus on St. Petersburg’s Liteiny drawbridge so it would be visible from the offices of the Federal Security Service when the bridge was raised. Many members of Voina are currently serving time. Alex Plutser-Sarno, who remains at liberty, said that the locus of the group is behind “a high, impenetrable wall of the St. Petersburg prison,” where the artists Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev are “slowly fading away.”

Some of the exhibitions shut down in the past decade or so include
Forbidden Art
at the Sakharov Center Moscow (2006), which cost the director his job;
Spiritual Invective
at Moscow’s Marat Guelman Gallery (2012), after which the organizers were brought in for questioning; and
Welcome to Sochi
, shown in Perm (2013), of which Putin-loyalist parliamentarian Andrei Klimov wrote, “The works brought together reminded me of the way Russia was portrayed by Hitler’s propagandists, and by Napoléon’s flunkeys before them. Goebbels, I’m sure, would be pleased.” Most recently, the Moscow Exhibition Halls Association shut down
Be Happy
at the
Bogorodskoe Gallery, Moscow (2015); and
Being Yourself: Stories of LGBT Teenagers
at Red Square gallery, Moscow (2015). When the organizers of the latter exhibition attempted to show their photos outdoors, the pictures were destroyed and photographer Denis Styazhkin, who is an activist for LGBT rights, and a sixteen-year-old onlooker were detained. Funding for the Moscow Premiere film festival was abruptly redirected to a new “Youth Festival of Life-Affirming Film” run by one of Putin’s cronies. Russian authorities have even tried to impede exhibitions abroad: the minister of culture objected to the public display of pieces slated for the Paris show
Sots Art: Political Art from Russia
, so he prevented them from leaving the country.